Casey Lurtz is a historian of modern Latin America and an assistant professor in the History Department at Johns Hopkins University.

I am a historian who explores how rural people understood, encountered, and shaped the world beyond their horizons and the landscapes beneath their feet. While mostly focused on Latin America, I am invested in tracing ties that stretched across oceans, in looking at how even a worn-down cabin at the end of a dirt trail became part of a globalized world.

My current project, From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico, 1867-1920, uses the development of southern Mexico's coffee economy to explain how engagement with global markets was shaped by resilient local political and social structures. The project also engages the history of global migrations and provides a picture of localized international commerce in the hands of Mexican and foreign planters, merchants, and politicians. It is under contract with Stanford University Press.

I teach courses related to Latin America, Mexico, commodities and the history of capitalism, migration, development, and the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. In Fall 2017 I will be teaching Modern Mexico from the Alamo to El Chapo at Johns Hopkins University.